You Need To Try These Yoga Wine Parties
Halfway through a plank pose, as your arms are jiggling and you've lost all willpower to keep your stomach sucked in, there's no better motivation to stick it out just a little longer than knowing there will be not one, not two, but six glasses of wine waiting for you afterward.
That's the payoff at the end of Wine Yoga Party, a New York-based class that combines an hour of yoga with an hourlong wine tasting. Admittedly, at first I was bummed that I wouldn't get to sip vino while I vinyasa — the type of yoga the class specializes in, where one pose flows into the next, making the hour fly by. But then I realized how quickly getting your drink on while attempting every warrior pose and chaturanga could be. Yoga gets decidedly less enjoyable when it ends with a trip to the emergency room, after all.
Founders Dina Ivas and Liz Howng divide their time at the party. Ivas is a certified yoga instructor, so she leads everyone through their poses — peppering them with plenty of wine puns along the way — while Howng, the wine expert, prepares the tasting. When the class is over, Howng sets up a table on one end of the room, handing out wine glasses to everyone. From there, she takes everyone through each of the six bottles she's selected.
BOOK A CLASS: Yoga Wine Party, eventbrite.com
At the December class I intended, the selection ran the gamut: Crémant de Bourgogne, a fruity, sparkling wine; a citrusy sauvignon blanc; a berry-heavy rosé; an all-too-sippable pinot noir; a slightly smoky merlot; and we ended things with a robust, blackberry-meets-chocolate meritage.
Howng guided everyone through each tasting, mixing wine education — like the fact that red wine tends to get lighter the more it's aged — with an open conversation about what everyone thought of each drink. As you move from one wine to the next, you follow the five S's of a traditional tasting: see, swirl, sniff, sip, and savor. And if you need an extra sip, just to make up your mind, they're happy to top off your drink, as long as there's still wine in the bottle.
There was no pretension, creating a comfortable enough environment where you could admit things like the fact that sauvignon blanc smells like cat urine, or that a certain merlot had notes of, uh, rubber cement?
"Wine is personal, so if you think something smells or tastes like rubber cement because you used to eat paste as a kid, we're not gonna judge you," Howng joked.
And judge me they did not, as I happily downed the rest of that glass. Spit bucket? Not on my watch.
Ivas and Howng host regular classes at Yo Yoga in midtown Manhattan, which you can book on yogawineparty.com, as well as private events and retreats.
For more yoga inspo, check out this cool new smart yoga mat!
You Might Also Like
